09/14/12 – Alejandro Beutel – The Scott Horton Show

Alejandro Beutel, formerly of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, discusses MPAC’s exposé on “America’s Top 25 Pseudo-Experts on Islam;” Daniel Pipes’s 2004 op-ed in which he justifies the WWII internment of Japanese Americans and calls for similar measures against Muslims; the “national security hucksters” who train law enforcement groups on the supposed dangers of Islam; successful anti-Islam propaganda from Danish cartoons to Innocence of Muslims; and how US Middle East hegemony, combined with perceived attacks against Islamic culture, provokes protests that Western media uses to frame all Muslims as anti-American crazies.

2 Comments

mikfax
on September 16, 2012 at 7:17 pm

When i first heard of this protest i immediately felt guilt and shame as i assumed this was the work of ignorant christians that were not behaving in line with the teaching of Jesus. However the loud voices within the muslim world have taken the bait hook line and sinker. In my country Australia they have broken their organised protest and started a violent protest a day earlier than they scheduled and carried signs like we love Osama. Although they may be a minority they are the worst enemy of their own faith and their own cause. Where is their Martin Luther King Jr? The rational peaceful muslims need to rally against the radicals just like the westboro baptist get the most amount of attacks to their protest by other peaceful christians, even though i appreciate the media will continue to focus on just the worst parts of all religions. The struggle must be within. So i hope the muslim public affairs is focused mostly on preaching to their own about peace instead of trying to sell it to secular people that arent buying it.

shamsshun
on September 17, 2012 at 12:55 pm

Daniel Pipes is a student of Medieval Islam who simply refuses to believe that Musilm majority countries – Arab ones in particular – can develop modern political ideologies and social structures of their own, without being beaten into submission and co-opted by the West. In these respects he follows the path of a historian of medieval Islam whom Edward Said identified as the exemplar of modern “Orientalism”, Bernard Lewis.

By the way, Daniel’s father, Richard, was the interim National Security Advisor to Gonad Reagan at the height of NSC-managed arms-running to the Islamic Republic of Iran. I assume Richard’s his real father, but I must note that Daniel bears an uncanny resemblance to the Ayatollah Khomeini…